For more than a century, Detroit held the title of Motor City because of its concentration of automobile manufacturers. But in the early 1900s, at the dawn of the Automobile Age, Kankakee (and dozens of other small communities across the country), could have contended for that title.
In those early years, hundreds of individuals and small companies were developing and building automobiles powered by steam, electricity or flammable liquids, such as kerosene or gasoline. Each car basically was hand-built by one or a few workers: mass production of automobiles did not take place until 1913 when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line (where each worker performed one part of the assembly as the vehicle moved past on a conveyor). Since many of the early auto designs closely resembled the horse-drawn vehicles of the time, they were commonly called “horseless carriages.”
Many of the very early automobiles were experiments that failed. For example, in the late 1890s, William O. Worth (who would later manufacture vehicles in Kankakee) designed a two-cylinder gasoline engine for a car being built by a small buggy manufacturer in Benton Harbor, Mich. The engine was claimed to develop a speed of 23 mph. Unfortunately, as a local newspaper reported, the car only could run a few hundred yards before coming to a stop.
Worth’s later designs were more successful. In 1907, he and his brother, John, formed the Worth Motor Car Manufacturing Co. in Evansville, Ind., but soon relocated to Kankakee, leasing a large building located west of the Illinois Central tracks and south of Brookmont Boulevard. That building, constructed in 1905 as the Sotham Cattle Co. sales barn, still is in use today as the Belt Route Warehouse.
One of the earliest vehicles produced in the Worth factory was a 12-passenger “sightseeing automobile” that was sold to the city of Chicago for use in its park system. The vehicle was claimed to “carry a heavy load at high speed” and be able to “climb steep hills with ease.”
Between 1907 and 1916, the factory turned out a variety of auto and truck models. The Worth roadster, available in two- or four-passenger models, was equipped with a two-cylinder, 12 horsepower gasoline engine. Power was delivered to the rear wheels by a friction-drive transmission and double chain drive. Also produced were a “station bus” design with room for a driver, four passengers and luggage, and a variety of boxy delivery trucks. One of those trucks, produced in 1916, was built for Henry Longtin, a grocer whose store was located on North Fifth Avenue.
Shortly after the Worth factory was operating in Kankakee, a concrete block factory building was erected alongside the Cincinnati, Lafayette and Southern Railroad tracks south of Waldron (today, Aroma Park). Beginning in 1909, the factory would produce the Waldron Runabout automobile. Similar to most other cars of the period, it looked like a “buggy without its horse.” It had an opposed two-cylinder engine, a friction transmission and double chain drive.
The Waldron Runabout Manufacturing Co., which had been incorporated in 1909 with a capital of $50,000, only built cars for two years before going out of existence. Today, the concrete slab floor of the building is all that remains. It can be found just west of the railroad tracks, a short distance south of Vanderkarr Road.
A number of other auto manufacturers were known to exist in and around Kankakee during that period, including the International Motor Car Manufacturing Co., the Chiniquy Brothers and Parker Co., and the Kankakee Auto Co. Beyond their names, little is known about them and the vehicles (if any) they produced. There is in existence a single example of a truck bearing a “KANKAKEE” nameplate on its radiator.
In 1913, the building housing the Worth automobile factory was acquired by Albert E. Cook, a real estate developer and entrepreneur. (Brookmont Boulevard in Kankakee was named for the Cook family’s 12-square-mile farm in Iowa.) In about 1916, the Worth auto manufacturing business was replaced by a new Cook venture: the Autofarmer Manufacturing Co., which built tractors and motorized plows. By the 1920s, the name had changed to Cook Motor Corp., and the product line switched from tractors to trucks.
Cook also was an inventor, holding a number of auto-related patents with Kankakee resident Thomas Van Tuyl.
One of the more interesting was a 1916 “combined land and water vehicle” which would allow the driver to switch from conventional wheeled drive to propeller propulsion as needed. There is no evidence that the vehicle was ever produced.
Kankakee’s opportunity to become the Motor City disappeared when the last local auto manufacturer, Cook Motor Corp., closed about 1930.
Probably the best evidence that the Automobile Age had come to Kankakee was the issuing of the city’s first ticket for speeding. When did that landmark event occur?
Answer: In April, 1907, Chicago resident George Griffith was ticketed for exceeding the speed limit while driving down Court Street. It was claimed that he was traveling at 40 miles per hour on that business street, which had a 10-mph limit. He was fined $25 and costs.